Our three AC2004 debates are fun, passionate, and relevant
discussions of key issues in each of our three conference
themes. Speakers are chosen to be captivating speakers, and
have compelling yet importantly opposing ideas on issues related
to the debate topic. Our skillful moderators will keep them
from getting too personal in their exchanges... we hope.

1. Physical
Space Debate

David
Brin vs. Brad Templeton, moderated
by Steve Jurvetson, on:"The
Costs and Benefits of Transparency: How Far, How Fast, How
Fair?"

(Saturday,
Nov 6, 2:30pm)Summary:David Brin is a Physicist, a Science Fiction
Writer, and the Author of The Transparent Society: Will
Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?,
1999, a book that proposes we can have increasing social transparency
without being forced to choose between freedom and security.
As a scientist, Brin was a fellow at the California Space
Institute. More recently, he has been a research affiliate
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and participated in interdisciplinary
activities at the UCLA Center for the Study of Evolution and
the Origin of Life. Brin notes our society's knee-jerk tendency
to either fear the future or blindly accept the status quo,
and argues today's complex world demands a third response:
increasing transparency, acknowledgement of our long term,
complex problems, honesty with our shortcomings, and confidence
that we can make measurable annual progress toward solutions.
For more information visit www.DavidBrin.comBrad Templeton is the Chairman of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. He asks: can all-pervasive surveillance
be avoided? What are the dangers if we don't avoid it? What
are the things that always go wrong? How closely tied are
privacy and freedom? Can we watch the watchers without them
watching us? Templeton founded and ran ClariNet Communications
Corp., the first internet-based content company, then sold
it to Newsedge Corporation in 1997. Author of a dozen microcomputer
software projects, he has been active in the computer network
community since 1979, participated in the building and growth
of USENET and in 1987 he founded and edited rec.humor.funny,
the most widely read computerized conference on that network.
Brad is chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
the leading civil rights advocacy group for cyberspace. He
also sits on the advisory boards for a few internet startups.
Currently he is building a new startup to reinvent the phone
call. For more information visit www.Templetons.com.
Moderator Steve Jurvetson is one of Silicon
Valley's leading venture capitalists and innovation experts.
He is a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. For
more information visit www.dfj.com.

One of
David's big issues is our culture and media's knee-jerk tendency
to either 1) fear the future or 2) blindly accept the status
quo, when today's complex world demands instead 3) a radical
new openness, honesty with our shortcomings, self-examination
of our unsolved problems, and confidence that we can make
measurable annual progress in fixing them. A quote for your
file:

"There's
a world to be saved and those who spread either complacency
or gloom aren't helping. What we need is confidence and
a sense that our efforts can matter. That will come, if
we open our eyes to how much good has already been done.
Are we ready, at last, to stop ridiculing those eager, can-do
boys and girls who believe in progress?" — David
Brin

David
proposes that we can have increasing transparency without
being forced to choose between freedom and security (e.g.,
more of one means less of the other).

Brad also
wants to avoid this forced tradeoff, but doesn't see increasing
transparency as the answer and is much less optimistic that
we are managing these issues well. Among
the questions he will ask: Can all-pervasive surveillance
be avoided? What are the dangers if we don't avoid it? What
are the things that always go wrong? How closely tied are
privacy and freedom? Can we watch the watchers without them
watching us?

Come join
us and add your voice to this important debate in the Q&A.

David
Brin, Ph.D. has a triple career as scientist, public
speaker, and author. His fifteen novels have been translated
into more than twenty languages. His 1989 ecological thriller,
Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare
and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. A 1998
movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The
Postman. Another novel, Startide Rising, is
in pre-production at Paramount Pictures. Brin's widely acclaimed
1998 non-fiction book -- The
Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between
Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with a wide range of
threats and opportunities facing our wired society during
the information age.

As
a scientist, Brin was a fellow at the California Space Institute.
More recently, he has been a research affiliate at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and participated in interdisciplinary
activities at the UCLA Center for the Study of Evolution and
the Origin of Life. He now lives in San Diego County with
his wife, two infants, and about a hundred very demanding
trees.

Brad
Templeton founded and ran ClariNet Communications
Corp., the first internet-based content company, then sold
it to Newsedge Corporation in 1997. ClariNet publishes an
online electronic newspaper delivered for live reading on
subscribers machines. He has been active in the computer network
community since 1979, participated in the building and growth
of USENET from its earliest days and in 1987 he founded and
edited rec.humor.funny, the world's most widely read computerized
conference on that network. He has been a software company
founder, and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer
software products.

Brad is
chairman of the board of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights advocacy
group for cyberspace. He also sits on the advisory boards
for a few internet startups. Currently he is building a new
startup to reinvent the phone call. He is also on the board
of the Foresight Institute, a nanotech think-tank.

Debate
moderator Steve Jurvetson is a Managing Director
of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Previously, Mr. Jurvetson was
an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard. His prior technical
experience also includes programming, materials science research
(TEM atomic imaging of GaAs), and computer design at HP's
PC Division, the Center for Materials Research, and Mostek.
He has also worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT
Software. As a Consultant with Bain & Company, Mr. Jurvetson
developed executive marketing, sales, engineering and business
strategies for a wide range of companies in the software,
networking and semiconductor industries. At
Stanford University, he finished his BSEE in 2.5 years and
graduated #1 in his class, as the Henry Ford Scholar.
Mr. Jurvetson also holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from
Stanford. He received his MBA from the Stanford Business School,
where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Mr. Jurvetson also serves on the Merrill Lynch and STVP Advisory
Boards and is Co-Chair of the NanoBusiness Alliance. He was
recently honored as "The Valley's Sharpest VC" on
the cover of Business 2.0 and chosen by the SF Chronicle
and SF Examiner as one of "the ten people expected to
have the greatest impact on the Bay Area in the early part
of the 21st Century." He was profiled in the New
York Times Magazine and featured on the cover of Worth
and Fortune Magazines. Steve was chosen by Forbes
as one of "Tech's Best Venture Investors", by the
VC Journal as one of the "Ten Most Influential VCs",
and by Fortune as part of their "Brain Trust
of Top Ten Minds."

Steve
has a thought-provoking new blog, the J
curve, that we suggest browsing. Check
out Brad's ideas blog
if you are a tinkerer and like redesigning things. Finally,
David's home page (http://davidbrin.com)
is a very important read as well.

(Sunday,
Nov 7, 9:30am)Summary:
Virtual worlds are becoming real world economic systems as
their currencies are exchangeable through secondary market
sellers like IGE and Gaming Open Market. Some innovative persistent
worlds, like Linden Lab's Second Life, give users
copyright over the content they create. Some gamers today
make substantial incomes offering virtual services (eg., avatar
creation) and virtual goods. For most people, virtual economies
are one of the "biggest things you've never heard of."
Where is the virtual economy going? Jamie Hale
is president of Gaming Open Market Corp., a Canadian company
that has built the world's first foreign exchange website
for massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) currencies. Jamie
has a degree in computer science and software engineering
from the University of Toronto. He is studying for his Canadian
Securities Course. For more information visit www.gamingopenmarket.com.
Steve Salyer is President of Internet Gaming
Entertainment (IGE) a leading services provider to the MMOG
community. He has twenty five years of senior management experience
at entertainment technology companies including Ubisoft, the
Learning Company, and Electronic Arts. For more information
visit www.ige.com. Brian
Green is a Co-Founder of Near Death Studios. Brian
has been an avid gamer for years, and has gaining degrees
in both Computer Science and Spanish Literature. He worked
on Meridian 59 where he helped design and program three updates
to the game, then worked on a single player game at 3DO. He
currently does programming, design, and writing for innovative
online games at Near Death Studios. For more visit www.neardeathstudios.com.
Daniel James is the CEO of Three Rings and
the Lead Designer of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. Three
Rings is an independent developer of online games based in
San Francisco. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is a skill-based
persistent world based on casual puzzle games. For more visit
www.threerings.net.
Moderator Cory Ondrejka is Vice President
of Product Development at Linden Lab, creators of one most
rapidly growing online persistent worlds, Second Life.
For more visit www.lindenlab.com
and www.secondlife.com

In
Detail: This debate will clue attendees in to one of
the biggest new emergences that most of us haven't yet heard
of: virtual property markets and their intellectual property
issues. The interchange may produce a few new business plans
and should also be a whole lot of fun. Participants will make
legal, dollar, behavioral, and design forecasts for the virtual
property markets within massively multi-player games, debating
the practice from seller and designer viewpoints, and business
vs. gaming intentions.

Since
then, such worlds have become increasingly popular, complex,
and connected to a number of real world economic systems,
including secondary market sellers like IGE
and Gaming Open
Market. Some gamers today are making a living offering
virtual services (eg., avatar creation), goods (producing
or trading goods) and currency market development and arbitrage.
There is now an annual conference at New York Law School dedicated
to sorting out the legal implications of these new physical-virtual
relationships (State
of Play). Dr. Castronova now has a tenured professorship
at Indiana University where he will be focusing on virtual
worlds studies.

Jamie
Hale is president of Gaming
Open Market, a Canadian company that has built the world's
first foreign exchange website for MMOG currencies. Jamie
has a degree in computer science and software engineering
from the University of Toronto, and maintains a healthy if
somewhat dusty library of economics and finance textbooks.
He is studying for his Canadian Securities Course.

Steve
Salyer is President of Internet
Gaming Entertainment (IGE), the world’s largest
secondary market for goods and currencies from massively multi-player
games and virtual worlds. He
has over
twenty five years of experience in senior management roles
in companies providing technology-based entertainment products.
Prior to joining IGE, he was president
of business development for Ubisoft.Steve
has produced music, television, and interactive products and
is an avid online gamer.

Brian
Green is Co-Founder of Near
Death Studios. Brian has been an avid gamer for years,
beginning with an addiction to a text MUD in college. After
gaining degrees in both Computer Science and Spanish Literature,
he got a job that would have made Dilbert cringe. After he
recognized a passion for online games that never went away,
he had the privilege of working on Meridian 59 where he helped
design and program three updates to the game before he worked
on a single player game at 3DO. Afterwards, he worked a short
time at Communities.com. He currently does programming, design,
and writing for innovative online games with the other co-founders
at Near Death Studios.

Daniel
Jamesis
CEO of Three Rings,
an independent developer of online games based in San Francisco,
and Lead Designer of Three Rings' first game, Yohoho!
Puzzle Pirates, a skill-based persistent world based
on casual puzzle games. Prior to founding Three Rings, Daniel
consulted on online games design, endeavoured to create Middle-earth
Online, and founded two successful start-ups. He has
been playing and building online games since 1983.

(Sunday,
Nov 7, 4:30pm)Summary:
As our interfaces get continually smarter, how do we keep
them from dehumanizing us? Should we be concerned that U.S.
youth have had forty years of declining math, science, and
analytical reading skills? Do we need 1960's math skills in
a world with ubiquitous calculators, or reading skills in
a world with digital cable? Or thinking skills in a world
with intelligent text analytics? Jaron Lanier
is the Founder of VPL Research and Advisor to the National
Tele-Immersion Initiative; he is also a Computer Scientist,
Composer and Artist. Lanier notes: Computer people are sounding
a lot like religious people these days. Meanwhile, old time
religious people seem to distrust the scientific program more
and more. Would stem cell research have been restricted if
it had come up twenty years ago? Religion has a way of sneaking
up on you, and so do religious wars. It takes two to fight
a war, and digital culture still has time to shut this war
down. All that we need is a little humility, honesty, and
the very hard work of designing computers for the sake of
people instead of the easier work of designing computers for
the sake of computers. For more information visit www.advanced.org/jaron/.
Will Wright is a Co-Founder of Maxis; and
Creator of Sim City. Wright's social simulation game, The
Sims, has become the best-selling PC game of all time. In
1999 he was included in Entertainment Weekly’s "It
List" of "the 100 most creative people in entertainment"
as well as Time Digital’s "Digital 50", a
listing of "the most important people shaping technology
today." For more information visit www.maxis.com
and www.ea.com. Moderator
Mark Finnern manages the Collaboration Area
of the fastest growing SAP Community: The SAP Developer Network.
Mark is also the founder and host of the Bay Area Future Salon,
co-producer of the Accelerating Change 2004 conference, and
blogger for the O'Reilly Network. For more information visit
www.futuresalon.org.

In
Detail:As
our interfaces get continually smarter, how do we keep them
from dehumanizing us? Can we avoid the world of MT
Anderson's masterful dystopia, Feed
(2002), where the internet-jacked, childlike teens of 2030
speak pidgin English and live primarily as vehicles for highly
sophisticated and automated corporate marketing and political
programming?

Should
we be concerned that U.S. youth have had forty
years of declining math, science, and analytical reading
skills? Do we need 1960's math skills in a world with ubiquitous
calculators, or reading skills in a world with digital cable?
Or thinking skills in a world with intelligent text analytics?

Encouragingly,
the Millennial generation reaches maturity earlier, communicates
in new nonlinear ways, and has a strong facility to adapt
to new technology. But are we in danger of losing our perspective,
independence, and global vision? What are our most important
priorities as we enter a world of increasingly sophisticated
interfaces and simulations?

Join
us as interface legends Jaron Lanier and
Will Wright discuss and debate this and related
topics in a fun, heated, and fascinating exchange.As
Jaron says, "All
that we need is a little humility, honesty, and the very hard
work of designing computers for the sake of people instead
of the easy fantasy work of designing computers for the sake
of computers."Jaron
Lanier is well known among developers as the co-inventor
of "virtual reality," a term he coined in the 1980s
as founder and former CEO of VPL Research. In the late 1980s
he lead the team that developed the first implementations
of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays
as well as the first "avatars." While at VPL, he
co-developed the first implementations of virtual reality
applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping,
virtual sets for television production, and assorted other
areas. He lead the team that developed the first widely used
software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality
applications.

As a musician,
Lanier has been active in the world of new "classical"
music since the late seventies. He is a pianist and a specialist
in unusual musical instruments, especially the wind and string
instruments of Asia. Renowned as a composer, musician, computer
scientist, and artist, he has taught at many university computer
science departments around the country, including Yale, Dartmouth,
Columbia and Penn. He recently served as the lead scientist
for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative. In 1993, he predicted
that virtual reality would be accessible to consumers by 2010.
He still thinks that's true.

Will
Wright is Chief Designer and Co-Founder of Maxis
(sold to Electronic Arts for $125M in 1997). He released his
first game SimCity: The City Simulator in 1989, an
instant hit which has won 24 domestic and international awards.
Sim City brought complex, realistic simulations to
desktop PCs, a capability previously only available to military,
scientists and academicians. Using an easy graphical interface,
Sim City opened the world of simulations to consumers.
SimCity
2000, SimCity 3000, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and SimCity
4 Deluxe have continued the tradition. SimEarth,
SimAnt, and SimCopter have explored other
facets of the natural and technological world.

His social
simulation game, The Sims, was released in February
of 2000. With over 9 million copies worldwide, 7 expansion
packs, and numerous "Game of The Year" accolades,
The Sims has become the best-selling PC game of all
time. The Sims Online and The Sims 2 (released
September 2004, to critical acclaim) are moving TheSims toward an increasingly realistic world where
you choose your role, attitude and destiny. He is now working
on a "third generation" simulation project at Maxis.

Wright
has become one of the most successful designers of interactive
entertainment in the world. In 1999 he was included in Entertainment
Weekly’s "It List" of "the 100 most
creative people in entertainment" as well as Time
Digital’s "Digital 50", listing of "the
most important people shaping technology today." As one
of his hobbies, Wright (along with his daughter) takes part
in the annual Battlebot competition broadcast nationally on
Comedy Central.

Debate
moderator Mark Finnern manages the Collaboration
Area of the fastest growing SAP Community: The
SAP Developer Network. Mark is also the founder and host
of the Bay Area Future
Salon, co-producer of the Accelerating
Change 2004 conference, and blogger for the O'Reilly
Network. An amateur musician and community builder, he
is interested in how we may best use technology to improve
personal insight and strengthen civic life.

Accelerating Change 2004 Panel Presentations

Our six panels highlight the views of leading thinkers on
strategic topics relevant to conference themes.

Dana Blankenhorn is a Technology Business
Journalist, Consultant, and Author of The Blankenhorn
Effect: How to Put Moore's Law to Work for You, 2002.
The title of his presentation is The World of 'Always
On'. He shares his perspective on what it will take to
get us to a world of 24/7 connectivity, pervasive broadband
and wireless, and secure and scalable standards that will
enable the next level of social opportunity and business productivity.
For more information visit www.corante.com/mooreslore/.
Joachim Schaper is the Vice President Americas
at SAP Research Labs. His presentation is titled Smart
Items in the Enterprise. SAP Labs is using smart technologies
to provide a holistic service-oriented architecture for the
seamless integration of real-world data and events with enterprise
software. Schaper discusses how this approach exploits the
capabilities of current, emerging and future ubiquitous pervasive
computing technologies, used reliably to assist enterprise-level
decision making. Distributing business logic to the periphery
of the network, with logic on the item, enables new and improved
business processes at the 'point-of-action', improving enterprise
system response time and scalability. Many companies are beginning
to use these new tools to provide high-value services that
can be enabled and distributed through an enterprise service
architecture. For more information visit www.SAP.com.
Andreas Olligschlaeger is the President of
TruNorth Data Systems. The title of his talk is Advanced
IT and Security Systems in Law Enforcement. Olligschaeger
notes that the use of information technology in law enforcement
has traditionally lagged behind private industry and increasingly
even consumers. This talk focuses on the current state of
the art in law enforcement technology as well as new technologies
in development. Central to the successful adoption and use
of new technologies in pervasive computing, data mining, forecasting,
and other areas is the resolution of privacy concerns by the
general public. Olligschlaeger was formerly Systems Scientist
at the Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
He has over 18 years experience working with advanced database
systems and GIS, and is internationally recognized for his
pioneering efforts in designing, developing and implementing
state-of-art law enforcement information systems. He was the
first person to automate geocoding of video, using speech
recognition and entity extraction techniques. Dr. Olligschlaeger
has worked with local, state, and federal law enforcement
agencies. For more information visit www.trunorthsystems.com.

Cynthia Breazeale (unrelated to Cynthia
Breazeal of MIT) is an IT Innovation Strategic Program Manager
at Intel. The title of her talk is Innovation Through
IT: Enabling Systemic Innovation. Here Breazeale shares
the key learning, strategies, and a few of the industry-transforming
results of the Intel IT Innovation organization. The Intel
IT division chartered a small organization to work outside
of the traditional roles and responsibilities and empowered
them to discover new business value through innovation. The
result was surprisingly immediate – and dramatic. Intellectual
property capture rates within IT increased over 600% the first
year. Emerging technology prototypes were merged with industry
solutions causing adoption at government levels to soar. A
new business practice was developed that provides IT managers
with a means to project measurable business value return from
information technology investments. The road to these successes,
however, was not obvious. For more information visit www.Intel.com/research/.
Steve Jurvetson is the Managing Director
of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. One of Silicon Valley's leading
lights in innovation funding, Jurvetson discusses DFJ's general
approach to the challenge of funding for technology and business
innovation. The title of his talk is Discovering a Renaissance
in Innovation. He notes that collectively, we are going
to be learning more in next 20 years than in the last 100
years. But there is a glacial change of human nature compared
to technological change. DFJ's international affiliates are
partners in a global innovation watch, maximizing the ability
to discover the next disruptive technologies while they are
in their earliest and most underfunded stages. Such perspectives
may be helpful to designing and managing your own innovation
pipeline in a world of increasingly global expertise. For
more information visit www.dfj.com.
Christine Peterson is a Co-Founder and Vice
President of the Foresight Institute and Co-Author, Leaping
the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work, 1997. The title
of her talk is Championing Innovation in Nanotechnology:
Lessons Learned. She sees her task at Foresight as helping
to maximize progress toward and minimize potential problems
coming from humanity's ever-increasing control of the structure
of matter, down to the level of individual atoms. One of the
most powerful developments we expect in coming years will
be new classes of molecular machine systems -- artificial
structures inspired by those found widely in nature. Vigorous
debate, policy formulation, and public education on this controversial
topic has been in progress since the late 1970s, and organized
since 1986. Major progress has been achieved, but challenges
remain. Foresight has been responsibly championing innovation
in nanotech research and policy debate for many years. Foresight
has concluded that open, cooperative international development,
including of defensive technologies, combined with stable,
trustworthy institutions is the best path forward. As the
National Nanotechnology Initiative and other efforts outside
the U.S. take new steps toward Feynman's vision, we need calm,
clear thinking about abstract, complex, and potentially scary
topics. Peterson discusses lessons learned in this process,
as each year takes us closer to a world of transformative
molecular nanotechnology. For more information visit www.foresight.org.

Milton Chen is the Chief Technical Officer
of VSee Lab. The title of his talk is Visual Communication
and Collaboration Software for Afghanistan. Here he presents
VSee, a videoconferencing platform designed for austere environments.
VSee is unique in that it allows communication during emergency
response when cell phone, telephone and the Internet are not
available. VSee was selected as the real-time communication
system for the recent Navy humanitarian exercise, Strong Angel.
Lastly, he describes the deployment of VSee in Afghanistan.
For more visit www.vseelab.com.
Jeremy Bailenson is Director of the Virtual
Human Interaction Lab as well as an Assistant Professor at
Stanford University. The title of his presentation is Collaborative
Virtual Environments and Transformed Social Interaction.
Bailenson notes that over time, our mode of remote communication
has evolved from written letters to telephones, email, internet
chat rooms, and videoconferences. Similarly, online collaborative
virtual environments (CVEs) promise to further change the
nature of interaction. CVEs are systems which track verbal
and nonverbal signals of multiple interactants and render
those signals onto avatars, three-dimensional, digital representations
of people in a shared digital space. Implications for communications
systems, marketing strategies, and behavioral science research
are briefly discussed. For more information visit www.stanford.edu/group/vhil/.
Dewayne Hendricks is a Wireless Activist,
CEO of Dandin Group and Director of the Wireless Task Force,
GBOB Initiative. The title of his talk is One Gigabit
or Bust™ Initiative - A Broadband Vision for California.
Hendricks notes that it has been generally accepted that the
United States has fallen behind other industrialized countries
with regards to the adoption of broadband services. Recent
estimates show penetration rates of only 35%, comparing poorly
to countries such as South Korea, which has adoption rates
exceeding 95%, with far greater average bandwidth rates delivered
at much lower costs. Other countries, including Canada, have
adopted national broadband initiatives to bring high speed
broadband connectivity to all its citizens. The United States
has no such initiative in place at the present time. The State
of California has decided to move ahead with its own broadband
initiative. His talk briefly outlines the goals and objectives
of the GBOB initiative and report on its progress to date.
For more information visit www.warpspeed.com.

Nova Barlow is an Online Community Developer
with the Themis Group. The title of her talk is The Art
of Community Management. Barlow believes that community
management is the critical success factor in determining whether
an online game slips into oblivion or grows into a successful,
long-lived service. Effective management directly impacts
conversion, retention, and, through word of mouth, sales.
Although many games have a "Community Manager",
this presentation will touch upon how community management
done right is really a team effort. She briefly provides an
overview of internal and external methods in this area, as
well as a few suggestions on what is needed to help create
and maximize potential. For more information visit www.themis-group.com.
Robin Harper is the Senior VP of Linden Lab,
creators of Second Life. The title of her presentation
is Real Learning in Digital Worlds. She asks: what
does it mean to try to teach in a digital world? The simulation
aspects of digital worlds are enticing. Instant focus groups,
real-time collaboration in a physically realistic environment,
the elimination of distance, and in a world like Second
Life, the ability to work together creatively, all hold
tremendous appeal for teachers and students alike. How are
people taking advantage of these opportunities? What does
it mean for the community in a digital world to have a class
of sociology students roaming the landscape? Harper looks
at the different ways people are experimenting with teaching
and learning in today's digital worlds. She joined Linden
Lab in 2002, bringing extensive experience in consumer marketing
of innovative software. She responsible for all marketing
activities, and more recently has added responsibility for
community development and growth. She was formerly the Vice
President of Marketing at Maxis, a division of Electronic
Arts. For more information visit www.lindenlab.com
and www.secondlife.com.
Moderator Clark Aldrich is lead
developer of SimuLearn's Virtual Leader, the first
workforce learning simulation to follow the development cycle
of a modern computer game. He recently authoredSimulations
and the Future of Learning, 2003. For more information,
visit www.simulearn.net.

Tim Sibley is the Chief Scientist at StreamSage.
The title of his presentation is Language Processing:
Is the Acceleration Missing? Sibley notes that while
advances in the field of computational linguistics certainly
add to the accelerating pace of technological change within
society, the field itself is riddled with exponentially hard
problems, inefficient development structures and incentives,
and disconnected efforts. In light of this, the field is in
some ways far less a model of accelerating change. His talk
makes assesses this situation, and provides general expectations
of what new changes we may expect to see in the near future.
For more, visit www.streamsage.com.
Wlodek Zadrozny is a Technologist for On
Demand Innovation Services at IBM Research. The title of his
talk is Analytics for Asset Valuation: Tools for Evaluating
Intangible Assets are Emerging and Will Change the Investment
Landscape. Intangible assets, such as brand value, customer
opinions or management quality, constitute 80% of stock market
valuation. Moreover, as a percentage, the proportion of intangible
assets is increasing. However, there are few tools for evaluating
and comparing intangibles. Zadrozny notes that this situation
is about to change: tools for evaluating intangible attributes
of value are emerging; they use text analytics and data mining,
and exploit information integration to bring together disparate
data sources. The coming change could be sudden, because there
is a core of a hundred or so attributes used to evaluate intangible
assets, and the existing technologies are capable of adequately
extracting their values. The promise: new tools and data repositories
that will allow investors to review company performance with
respect to the intangibles in the same way as spreadsheets
and balance sheets currently do for the tangibles. For more
visit domino.research.ibm.com/odis/odis.nsf.
Rich Skrenta is Co-Founder and CEO of Topix.net.
The title of his talk is Text Analytics for News.
Skrenta provides an overview of automated text analytics tools
that have allowed Topix to emerge as a customized aggregator
for local news. In his last position, Rich held a variety
of senior roles at Netscape/America Online, including Director
of Engineering for Netscape Search, AOL Music, and AOL Shopping.
Rich joined Netscape/AOL upon its purchase of NewHoo/The Open
Directory Project, where he was Co-founder & CEO. Previously,
Rich led an engineering group at Sun Microsystems, and ran
a successful online gaming company from 1994-2001. Rich has
a BA degree from Northwestern University. For more information
visit www.topix.net.

Lada Adamic is a Research Scientist at HP
Labs. Her presentation is titled Implicit Structure and
the Dynamics of Blogspace. Leveraging the electronic
nature of blogs, email, and instant messaging, her group studies
the flow of information and its underlying social networks
on a large scale. Recently, her group has developed a new
ranking algorithm, iRank, for blogs. Weblogs link together
in a complex structure through which new ideas and discourse
can flow. Such a structure is ideal for the study of the propagation
of information. Adamic describes general categories of information
epidemics and has created tools to infer and visualize the
paths specific infections take through the network. This inference
is based in part on a novel utilization of data describing
historical, repeating patterns of infection. Lada Adamic has
a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 2001,
and was previously a researcher at the Internet Ecologies
group at Xerox PARC. For more information visit www.hpl.hp.com.
Peter Kaminski is the Chief Technical Officer
and a Co-Founder of Socialtext. The title of his talk is Enterprising
Social Software: Wikis and Weblogs. Kaminski describes
wikis and weblogs as lean, efficient tools born and bred on
the web for working together as we share information. What
can we learn from these tools and the way they're used as
we adapt them for use within the enterprise? He discusses
lessons learned in the course of developing and bringing the
original enterprise wiki to market. Kaminski has more than
20 years of executive management and technology development
experience, specializing in leading-edge applications of network
and information technologies. For more information visit www.socialtext.com
and www.peterkaminski.com.
Zack Rosen is the Founder and Director of
CivicSpace Labs and the Creator of DeanSpace social software.
His talk is titled Empowering Democracy through Social
Software. He expects that social software will help define
the future of our political process and the world's power
structure. He describes breakthroughs this past year in the
United States and notes glimpses of a radical reshaping now
occurring in South Korea. But what are the dynamics that are
driving this insurgency? What will be the next breakthrough?
What are the societal implications? His presentation discusses
these questions and considers the future of U.S. democracy.
For more information visit www.civicspacelabs.org.